Pain In Soldier's Home, By Ernest Hemingway

Words: 1935
Pages: 8
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To many people, pain is a familiar feeling, like an underclassman watching their senior friends move on to better things or a mother watching her child deal with the loss of a loved one. Pain is everywhere and in everyone, but when it comes to knowing how badly someone is hurting, everybody is clueless. People in pain hide behind the supportive comments and distract themselves from the suffering, but writing has always been a way to heal. Literature from the American Seminar course shows pain, wanting to educate and connect Americans to prove we are not alone. American literature that perfectly represents pain is Soldier’s Home by Ernest Hemingway, a fictional short story; the essay Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson; Narrative of the Life of Frederick …show more content…
Readers see firsthand how traumatic slavery was because of Douglass and his writings. On page 932, Douglass describes the time his mother died and how emotionless he felt because no one allowed slaves and their children to bond. Later in his life, Douglass’s grandmother is rewarded for her decades of hard work by dying alone in the woods. Since he knew his grandmother better, it was more painful, and readers can see that in his next paragraph on page 952, “there are none of her children or grandchildren present, to wipe from her wrinkled brow the cold sweat of death, or to place beneath the sod her fallen remains.” Douglass learned how to be sensitive after his mother passed, but now that his grandmother has died a cruel death, he has shut his feelings off to protect himself from the pain. This same method is used by Celie in The Color Purple. When Celie is suffering, she thinks of herself as a tree. A tree doesn’t feel anything, so Celie thinks like a tree to avoid not only the pain, but also the joy of life. This mentality causes dissociation in both Celie and Douglass, and over time readers can see them open up, like how Celie let Shug Avery know about Nettie’s letters and how Douglass found friends at the Sabbath
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